Puppet Labs Gets Funding from Kleiner Perkins

Data center automation provider Puppet Labs has secured a $5 million Series B funding round led by venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, and also announced the release of new features for its server management software. Existing investors True Ventures and Radar Partners, which participated in the Series A round, also contributed to the new investment round, which brought Puppet Labs’ total funding to date to more than $7 million. Puppet Labs plans to use this funding to drive the company’s growth by building out its engineering team.

Puppet is an open source data center automation and configuration management framework that provides system administrators with a simplified platform for managing virtual servers. Most available solutions rely on scripts, built manually from scratch, and have no reusability or portability. Puppet automates this process to accelerate deployment and improve consistency of data center resources.

“Puppet is backed by a large community and thousands of users,” said Kevin Compton, a partner at Radar Partners, who will join the company’s board. “Sys admins everywhere know and love Puppet because it makes their life easier. Puppet Labs is uniquely positioned in the market and has a tremendous opportunity because it’s going up against legacy systems or manual, do-it-yourself processes that have to be written from scratch for each system, every time. Puppet is a platform to automate that entire procedure.”

Investor Focus on Configuration Management
The funding for Puppet reflects the growing focus on configuration management as a key component of the shift to cloud computing infrastructures. Virtualization has made it easier than ever to quickly create and deploy new servers. That’s placed a premium on configuring and managing all these new servers so they can work together effectively in a cohesive infrastructure.
Last month Opscode received $11 million in funding for an open source configuration management tool. Both Puppet Labs and Opscode are participants in the new OpenStack cloud computing platform, which figures to boost interest in using open source tools and software to build scalable cloud platforms.

“As data centers have moved from large consolidated systems to small distributed systems and cloud architectures, the ability to scale quickly and consistently has become an enormous problem for enterprises,” said Matt Murphy, Partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. “Puppet has a passionate user base and is well positioned to be the leader in the huge opportunity in data center automation and systems management.”

High Profile VC Participation
Kleiner Perkins has a high profile in the Silicon Valley venture capital community, having invested in success stories like Amazon, Genentech, Google and Sun. “Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers’ track record investing in hugely successful technology companies speaks for itself,” said Luke Kanies, CEO of Puppet Labs. “We’re thrilled that along with True Ventures and Radar Partners, they see it’s crucial for enterprises to automate their data centers in a reusable way.”

Puppet Labs today also announced the release of Puppet 2.6, a major upgrade to the Puppet platform, with a focus on improvements for enterprise environments.

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About the Author

Rich Miller is the founder and editor at large of Data Center Knowledge, and has been reporting on the data center sector since 2000. He has tracked the growing impact of high-density computing on the power and cooling of data centers, and the resulting push for improved energy efficiency in these facilities.

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